The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

The other day, I was talking with a geneticist at a major research university, and the subject of how tight funding for the sciences is these days. Times are especially tough for the sorts of blue sky research that is necessary for laying the groundwork for the breakthroughs we look to researchers to deliver—if the average person can't immediately grasp why a particular study is necessary for society, there's a risk a politician could call it out as wasteful.

So I got to thinking: What other ways could researchers fund studies in the future that don't come with the political strings that are bundled with public financing or getting money from private companies? The immediate answer: Crowdsourcing. Basically: A Kickstarter for science.

If I saw somebody was working on an important study, I would gladly chip in a few dollars to allow them to complete it without having to answer to politicians and taxpayers. This is doubly true if the study had obvious overtones of controversy. Lots of researchers know to stay away from certain subjects, lest political hammers fall down upon them. A Kickstarter-like site could give them an alternate avenue for financing. And while some sites do offer researchers this avenue for funding studies (iamscientist.com is one pointed out to me by readers), such a path is far from typical for researchers looking for resources.

Even if such sites did catch on, this isn't a perfect solution—and it certainly comes with its own potential pitfalls. As Eric Porges, a Ph.D. candidate in the Integrative Neuroscience program at the University of Chicago (who also happens to be my brother) pointed out to me, although rich benefactors already fund some science, forcing researchers to sell their projects to a wider, less educated population is both problematic—and possibly inevitable. "The demands on researchers are already so great to sell their stuff, and it has resulted in, in my opinion, a tendency to misconstrue, oversell and sensationalize their work, that I can only imagine that selling to an even less educated audience would only result in more and worse of the same," he told me. "That said, while I think that the consequences would be pernicious, it's basically inevitable that it will be done."

The problem for translating the Kickstarter model to science, as Eric sees it: The average consumer may say they want to buy an in-development gadget, movie, or art project (all of which are popular types of Kickstarter projects), but once you get into science, both the risk and reward go up. It's harder to communicate to the public the benefits of obscure research, and the science could take years to actually pay off—if it ever does. "It must be done right, and you'd have to manage expectations," Eric says. "A big challenge is simply that science education and literacy amongst the general public is so variable."

[Correction: An earlier version of this post was written without acknowledgement of the sites that do offer scientific crowdsourcing. I did not mean to imply that they didn't exist, but that they are not a typical method used by most members of the scientific community at the present. I have adjusted the text to reflect this clarification.]